Profile type

Medium-depth

What is this career path?

Biomedical scientists do research on how the human body works with the aim of finding new ways to improve health. Biomedical research spans academia and industry. Academia tends to focus on improving tools and techniques, studying healthy biological processes and studying diseases, whereas industry tends to focus on generating and evaluating possible treatments. [1]

In this profile we focus on biomedical scientists who work in academia.

What does the work involve?

What are the major stages of this career?

Training is done either through a PhD in biomedical sciences, or through doing a medical degree.

Typical career trajectory:

Initial training: Study in medicine or a PhD in biological sciences (4-10 years)

Junior researcher: Work in an established lab underneath the lab head, initially as a postdoc, and then as a tenure-track professor. During this phase you aim to publish, and find a promising field to specialise in.

Tenured professor:: Lead a lab, manage students, post-docs and other junior researchers, apply for research grants, sometimes teach.

What are the major sub-options within this path?

What is it like day-to-day?

Your days mainly consist of:

Running experiments in the lab

Writing academic papers and grant applications

Discussing your experiments with your boss and other members of the lab

Going to conferences, talks and learning about developments in the field

Teaching graduate students

If senior, managing and mentoring the other members of your lab.

Junior researchers may spend most of their time in the lab, while senior researchers spend most of their time managing, writing papers and speaking to other researchers.

What does it take to progress?

“This career is hard to predict. You have someone just starting their PhD. It’s quite hard to predict how it’s going to go for them. If they’ve done really well, they’ll probably succeed, but probably not quite as they imagine. And you may find that, although you’re first author on a Nature paper, you relied on having a great mentor. If they haven’t done really well, they can succeed, I’ve seen it happen. More likely, they’ll have to do something else.” “You’ll need to bear in mind that if it’s not working out, you may need to think about alternatives. It’s better to make the decision at that point rather than in 10 years. You can help yourself a lot by going to a top lab. Then ask, are you swimming or sinking?” https://80000hours.org/2014/01/interview-with-leading-hiv-vaccine-researcher-prof-sir-andrew-mcmichael/

"“To pursue any scientific career, you must have an insatiable curiosity for your subject because what we do is hard, and most of the time things don’t work and it can be quite frustrating. Every now and again you have a day where something amazing happens and you get a really fascinating result that makes the other 364 days of the year feel worthwhile. Unless you have an absolute obsession with your subject, it’s very hard to persevere and not become demoralized. I personally am really obsessed with how the immune system interacts with the malaria parasite and how t-cells evolve after vaccination. I’m lucky enough to travel to Africa now and again and see the magnitude of the problem that we’re trying to address. If you’re not motivated in that way and don’t really think you can make a difference with what you’re doing, then it’s probably not the career for you.” https://80000hours.org/2013/11/interview-with-malaria-vaccine-researcher-katie-ewer/

“It is a tough career, and nobody goes into medical research for the money. You get into it because you believe you can make a difference and it’s scientifically and academically challenging and stimulating. I would strongly advise people to find a branch of medicine or science in which they can find a new question to answer and be motivated enough to go and answer when their last 10 experiments haven’t worked and they don’t know why.” https://80000hours.org/2013/11/interview-with-malaria-vaccine-researcher-katie-ewer/

Culture

Exploration value

Role impact

Direct impact potential

"Overall, there is strong evidence that new biomedical technologies have created significant value, as measured through the economic value of health improvements. Some scholars believe that even if public sector research was responsible for only a small share of this gain, it delivers high returns on investment (Murphy and Topel 2003)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK83123/

“I think these kinds of issues [bad study design and other biases] are more of a problem in clinical trials. You’re not going to get funding to do a laboratory based project if it has been done before or it isn’t a very sound idea. The process is very rigorous.” “I agree that negative results tend not to be published, which does bias the field occasionally. And sometimes something gets published, but there’s never any follow up, so you might doubt it’s a real result. But in basic science, the word normally gets out one way or another. It’ll probably be mentioned in reviews eventually.” https://80000hours.org/2014/01/interview-with-leading-hiv-vaccine-researcher-prof-sir-andrew-mcmichael/

Talent constraint

For the good person who’s CV you just described, would you prefer their CV landing on your desk or an extra grant?

“It’s not a simple choice. If they’re that good, they’ll probably get their own funding at some point. You can take them on without huge risk. I would always take the person.”

How about if you could have half a million pound grant?

“It’s hard to turn down half a million pounds. I wouldn’t know many groups who would. You could buy another machine or do another project that would be too expensive otherwise. It depends on how much money I’ve got there already. It’s fantastic to get good people though, no question.”

Can good researchers always get funding?

“Yes, reasonably easily. Everyone can get bad patches. It’s unusual to always be on top of everything. For instance, you can get a dip at the end of a line of work, while you’re getting ready to start something else. But on the whole they can.”

Would you prefer £100,000 per year or [a good person] working for you?

“Definitely the guy”

How about £0.5mn per year?

“I’d still the take the person at £0.5mn. By £5mn, I’d prefer the money! There’s a cut off somewhere between the two.”

Why would you pay so much?

“It’s very difficult to find brilliant people who have the true grit to get things done, even if it takes a long time. Most of them end up in the city.”

“The best people are the biggest struggle. The funding isn’t a problem. It’s getting really special people. I call them the one percenters…If you have a good person, it’s easy to get the grants for them. I don’t think there’s a really good researcher out there who couldn’t get funding from the MRC or Wellcome Trust.”

Is your impression is that it’s harder to find good researchers or additional funding?

“In order for research to progress, you need lots of different types of people within an organization. You need people who are very methodical in what they do and are capable of doing large volumes of high through-put work, and then you need a few people at the top with the creativity to pull ideas out of the sky that nobody else would ever think of and convince Bill Gates to give you £1 million. I guess if you have somebody like that in your institution who is that creative and has that amazing ability and insight, then you can probably convince people to give you £1 million. But funding is always limited. We could proceed our field more quickly if we had as much funding as the HIV field.”

“If you are uniquely gifted in scientific research, then you should probably be a scientific researcher. But for the other 99.9% of the population, they’re probably best going and earning £1 million elsewhere and funding research.”

“Overall, I think it’s a fantastic career. The downsides are that it’s not very secure. People can run into funding problems, especially if they’re not at the peak of things or a bit unlucky. It’s not particularly well paid. It has its ups and downs. The ups more than compensate, but when you have a string of bad results and grants rejected, it gets a bit depressing.” “It can leave people a bit stranded mid career. You start out well, but you don’t quite make it to the top. You’re on a 3-5 year contract. You find it doesn’t get renewed. You’re 45 and stranded. https://80000hours.org/2014/01/interview-with-leading-hiv-vaccine-researcher-prof-sir-andrew-mcmichael/

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“We get a lot of people who think they might want to do a PhD and they’re coming to the lab to see a) what it’s like to work in a research group and b) what vaccine research is like. I think that’s a good idea before you commit yourself to a PhD program or even a master’s program. Getting a job as a research assistant is often a good way in, but those posts are often quite competitive. I have hired about eight research assistants in my time at the Jenner. Half of those will go onto do a PhD within the Jenner, some of them will stay as research assistants, and others will decide to do something else.” https://80000hours.org/2013/11/interview-with-malaria-vaccine-researcher-katie-ewer/